domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
haroldbkny
50m ago
I don't know. I was also really surprised that Red Lobster could somehow botch a standard all-you-can-eat deal to the point of bankrupcy. Restaurants have been doing all-you-can-eat deals since 1947, and Red Lobster has been successfully operating restaurants since 1968. Why would all-you-can-eat suddenly have become unenforceable to the degree that Red Lobster can go bankrupt from it, when this doesn't seem to be a previously established pattern? Did something change about the enforceability of such deals? Something really does smell fishy, here.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1hr ago
Indeed, I don't doubt that your general understanding of the situation was on point; I just wanted to clarify that the rules you were following were immediately based in the UCMJ and the relevant ROEs for your situation, not the international treaties and conventions concerning actions in war.
I think this is an important distinction because I've found that many people think the Convention-based laws of war are vastly more restrictive than they actually are, and this sometimes undermines the persuasive authority of those agreements. In actual fact, they are much more modest and practical documents that drew a great deal from the brutal lessons taught in the World Wars.
Relatedly, I think a lot of people don't understand just how much more constraining the UCMJ and many ROEs are compared to the international Conventions, in terms of permissible actions by members of the US armed forces. US military discipline is due nearly entirely to internal controls, and those controls could be relaxed a great deal before running afoul of those international agreements. I'd prefer it if we didn't need to explore that space, but it is available.
I’m not sure this is true. I think most women explicitly prefer no interest to unwanted interest. If female-centric outlets started saying loudly, “don’t punish men for politely trying their luck” then the dynamics might change quickly.
I don't know if I really agree that the "revealed preference" of women is to have no interest as opposed to unwanted interest. Women who have tons of unwanted interest may say that, because of status signalling, virtue signalling, and because they may not know what it's like to actually have no interest. But women who actually have no interest may reveal the preference. For a glimpse of this, look at how single women in their late 40s and 50s behave and how aging women tend to lament the lack of the previous unwanted advances.
TIRM
1hr ago
I see. That's not quite what Google told me, but Google is only approximately accurate.
So that means someone could become a Canadian citizen with a grand total of 3 years in Canada. Which sounds really, really low. It's five years in the US after attaining permanent residency. Which is also rather low in my opinion.
ares
1hr ago
Se my other comment for specifics on this particular incident, but in that sentence I was trying to speak more generally about how another country's court would rule compared to the US courts. I was thinking of things like death penalties for non-capital crimes, lack of due process, punishment for political or religious crimes, etc.
Hasn't it only been about 5 years now that society has been worried about population collapse?
My mother remembers Population Bomb rhetoric when she was younger. Google says China only ended their one child policy in 2016. The trends are probably just moving too fast. If you tell a whole generation they're destroying the world by having children, it surely takes some time to pull that back with "we didn't mean you, women who were already having 2.5 children! We meant the Nigerian ones having 7 children in desperate poverty! (But, also, global warming is a very terrible disaster, you should feel bad)"
I think the Christian perspective is something like that marriage is hard, but it's alright to ask hard things of people. Traditional cultures also ask people to do things like serve in the military, fast, and stand multiple hours for public ceremonies. Orthodox churches have crowns instead of vows, and one of the several symbols involved is "crowns of martyrdom." Is staying married to an angry, unpleasant man and bearing his children as hard an ask as fighting in a war? I don't know, I've never done either, but maybe it is! And if we have a norm of people in general never needing to do hard things, it isn't surprising that the same would be true of marriages.
ares
1hr ago
You raise good points (here and below), and I'm sorry I glossed over that part. I tried not to let the real story get too much in the way of the one I was telling, but I forgot that this is the sort of forum where I can't get away with that.
This occurred back in 2005-2006: hunting Somali pirates before hunting Somali pirates was cool. Our ARG was initially deployed for OPLAT (oil platform) Defense over by the Gulf of Oman, but there were a few hijackings and we were redirected to the East coast of Somalia. Back then Somali piracy was in its infancy, and the world hadn't really reacted. International Maritime Law on piracy wasn't prepared for their tactics, and our JAG plus his more senior lawyer bosses ashore gave us some pretty shitty conclusions about what we could and couldn't do legally. We couldn't do anything to the skiffs while they were just driving around because as much as we knew they were pirates, the JAGs didn't believe the USA could prove it. They always claimed they were fishermen. After a hijacking, it was a civil issue between the ship owners and the pirates. We were only able to actually treat them like pirates if we caught them in the act of piracy, which of course we never did because, see ref A, we were a big warship that could be seen from 15 nautical miles away. Anyways, we had at least 1 large maritime vessel hijacked while we were in the area, and we couldn't do anything about it other than watch. I heard that got the ball rolling on actually updating the international laws (or, perhaps, the US Military's creative interpretation of those laws) so the US could actually do something about the pirates, but I never did much followup to check because I was never out on anti-piracy operations again. The Navy did send me back to the Horn of Africa for other stuff (such a shitty part of the world), but that's completely unrelated.
So who we caught, according to our JAG, was not a group of pirates. They were a group of fishermen who fired small arms and an RPG at a US Naval Vessel. Maybe I was wrong to mention "rules of war" since they weren't uniformed combatants, but we don't kill people who have surrendered and don't pose any more threat to us. After lots (lots) of training on the lawful use of deadly force, my gut tells me that shooting them all and sinking their skiff after they threw down their weapons would have gotten everyone a court martial. I can't cite which specific way they'd be charged, though. It's been too long, and at the time I was a lowly JO who wasn't privy to the actual JAG opinions or conversations about it.
Captains get a lot of leeway in judicial decisions on their ships, but they are generally smart enough to listen to their JAG, and JAG said no keelhauling. So the fishermen/pirates got about 10 days of excellent medical care, good food, comfortable beds, (relative to Somalia) and then were promptly executed by Yemen.
anti_dan
2hr ago
They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.
But whose going to enforce this? If the people doing the 10 for 1 buffet option complain wont you have to call the police? And in major metros the police will not respond to such a complaint. And if they did, not for hours.
jeroboam
2hr ago
You didn't read my comment. Women actually do play pickup sports (in very rare instances). They join men's games as I noted.
But women don't ever play pickup with other women. There are nearly 400,000 girls playing high school basketball in the U.S. right now. There are millions of women who played basketball in high school. And, yet, I have never once witnessed or heard about a group of women going to the park and playing basketball. Never. Not even once.
It's quite remarkable. Women just aren't that interested in sports for their own sake. What they get from athletics is different: team bonding, recognition, feelings of accomplishment, etc.. But they don't love to ball.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
2hr ago
Googling seems to suggest yes. For the sake of not leaving anyone out:
I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You are feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she can go and get ravaged by another man. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it has one simple result: her body is more enjoyable for the men that will eventually fuck her in every hole.
Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random man who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who marries her. He gets to fuck her tight pussy every night. He gets the benefits of her kind and sweet personality that came from the way you raised her.
As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to raise a girl for another man to enjoy. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.
Gaashk
2hr ago
Or perhaps by convincing their men to actually treat them well?
If the rumors of (for instance) the Black community are remotely true, then, yes, it's better to be dependent on the US government, despite its flaws.
anti_dan
2hr ago
'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward.
I want to +1 this.
And of course #metoo is in its usual formulation also delusionally neurotic.
And -1 this.
When I was in high school I literally dated my best friend's girlfriend's sister. We broke up like 2 years before they did. I saw all of them all of the time. It was fine. In college everybody I knew dated someone in their major at some point. It rarely ended in a blissful marriage. More often one of them ended the relationship and had an immediate fallback plan, which was the obvious cause of the breakup. We survived. Beer and vodka solve such things.
But me too. I was in school before that got big, mostly, and it is scary for good reason. I do know 2 male engineers who got expelled for 1 night stands at parties I was at. And they were drunk and the girl was drunk and they were like sloppily making out on the couch and then like a month later he gets a notice of a hearing.
I guess the real lesson is, of course, avoid hook ups, court a lass and you should be fine.
Maybe we ought to just accept the world's population contraction. Who knows, maybe there really is some sort of equilibrium where this mysterious negative feedback mechanism we can't identify will taper off. If we are completely allergic to placing demands upon our women on a societal level, which we clearly—and astonishingly suddenly—are, I just don't see a way to a future with more kids.
The hypothetical case of a domineering, asshole husband is just too rhetorically powerful. I have conservative friends who agree that no-fault divorce was a mistake, but always with the reflexive ritual mitigation: of course any system that doesn't afford each woman an easy, automatic penalty-free exit from the marriage, so long as it's deemed abusive, is a non-starter. Just how common a problem was this? I have no idea. Sure enough stories from the Bible and historical accounts from hundreds of years ago are filled with examples of husbands taking counsel from their wives, being convinced this way or that. Instead of noble agents fulfilling an ancient and proud feminine role, however, these women may today be considered "hidden figures" who were repressed and prevented from participating in public affairs first-hand.
Gaashk
2hr ago
I think someone can get a job as a landscaper around here just by asking. One acquaintance (with a MFA fwiw) is working as a handyman by mostly just asking around, which seems to be going alright. I haven't noticed anyone really having a problem with those kinds of jobs around here, or anyone complaining about getting them, either. It's the jobs by which a man can be the main earner for his family, and his wife can afford to take a few years off to be with the young children that are the issue.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
2hr ago
And now ymeskhout.
Gaashk
2hr ago
Whenever the topic of tradwives and fertility comes up, my first thought is, what do the women on this board think?
Grew up in a very trad wife centric Christian homeschool subculture. It mostly didn't work out. Mostly, we had to get jobs. It isn't trivially easy to find a man who's prepared to be a husband, father, and primary earner fairly young, willing to ask girls out, often at venues like church functions, and interested in those girls. There are some, sure, and some families were formed that way. But now in our late 30s, I'm hearing about even some of the women who did marry a traditional head of household man divorcing, because he's pushy, unpleasant, domineering, and re-training as a nurse or something, now with several children.
Marriages don't have to rise to the level of beating to be worse than working a lower middle class female job. If my now husband hadn't kept inviting me on romantic dates at ancient castles, I would still be basically content with being single, because being a single woman in the modern world is really just fine, with a long educated Anglophone tradition full of slightly lonely but basically fine governesses and nuns. Even at the standards of a century ago, I would certainly rather be a nun than marry a man I didn't like, of whom people said "well at least he doesn't beat you, just have more grit."
I am not a feminist by current standards. My grandmothers and great grandmothers went to teaching colleges, and followed their husbands around the world while they translated Mayan carvings or something, and returned to teaching when their children where older. They kept copies of Virginia Woolf in their houses. There are great grandmothers I don't know much about, because their children ran away from home (and first marriages, I think?) and met up on a Pacific island, and then went on to have those 3-4 kids together, and raise them while teaching. I don't know how to evaluate the alternate universe where everyone had more grit, sticking out their first marriage on some frozen windswept cattle ranch.
Much is made of the state of family formation in Asia lately. Chinese great grandmothers probably had too much grit, breaking their daughters' feet to help their marriage prospects. I don't know how things were for the great grandmothers of the current generation of South Korean women -- the educational issues there sound like an excess of grit -- everyone could just not cram that extra hour, and things would likely be just the same, but slightly more pleasant. It sounds very zero sum after a pretty baseline educational level and some research skills.
Anyway, I'm pregnant with a third baby because I don't think being not particularly successful in America is that bad, actually. Probably none of my kids will go to an unusually excellent college or have an unusually excellent job or win at a high level competition, and that's alright. Someone came in to my classroom today to say that she's pleased that her daughter is shift manager at a Starbucks and leading literacy tutoring over the summer. This is good! People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!
laxam
2hr ago
Whether or not a successful Reconstruction where blacks enjoyed equal rights and Southern whites were reconciled to this and to the Union was ever really in the cards is a pretty deep historical question that would probably take a lifetime of historical research to opine on in an informed manner.
But not coming down hard on ex-rebs absolutely kiboshed any chance of serious armed insurgency and Ireland-style long term separatism. I'm of the opinion that a bit stiffer a spine from Congress in the 1880s could have preserved most of the civil rights against made but, as per above, that's not really something I can back up to an adequate degree.
sliders1234
2hr ago
Definitely no. Basketball outfits are no way as sexy as doing yoga on the beach or even any outfit I see a women wearing in the weight room.
I don't think the complaint is fully general with respect to measures that help with policing. Police are already capable of physically arresting people in the midst of rioting or other illegal acts (at the cost of public scrutiny), regardless of whether they are masked. Forcing everyone to be unmasked during protests will help police prosecuting illegal and broadly disliked acts a little, in those cases where they are too overwhelmed to catch individuals in flagranti; it will help them a bit more in situations where they want to avoid public scrutiny, so rather than visibly arresting people for political crimes they can quietly come after them later; and it helps with extrajudicial punishment such as cancellation and debanking, where the punishers have no right to perform a physical arrest, a lot.
In concrete terms, for example, I would have been quite happy to turn up to a masked protest against excessive COVID measures (not that such a deliciously ironic event was on offer anywhere I lived). I would not go to one if I were compelled to show my face, since I'm in a line of work where an easily identifiable photo in that context could be career-ending.
EvanTh
3hr ago
Does Uber collect payroll taxes?
No, their drivers are all considered independent contractors. A driver's supposed to pay the payroll taxes himself when he files income taxes.
sliders1234
3hr ago
I played tonight. So know the culture but yes it’s weird guarding a girl. But most major cities should have a large enough network of girls who played in college who should be connected and have their game?
Even at gyms for one offs I have never seen the college women players show up. I played at EBC in Chicago for a while (highest gym for Chicago) and we had from Simeon Rice to 70 year olds as regulars. A division one girl could be atleast regularly the 4th best player on the team. And after embarrassing guys who would take them easy for a 2 weeks I think that would end. But never happened. Chicago should have 20-50 ex Big Ten players. I’ve also ran into a lot of male college players who just quit playing.
It would be an interesting research project to interview ex-college or high school players on why they completely quit playing.
From my experience, you can apply in person to entry-level, wagie jobs, and they may want you to work there, but if it's not a small business, you will still have to painstakingly submit an application online anyway. Some kind of humiliation ritual, perhaps.
The best part is that the people in charge of hiring you will also struggle with the process, as the devices they have in their grocery store have awkward hardware, the 3rd-party app (successfactor) is complicated or constantly changing, and they don't actually perform that process very often.
The technology was supposed to make hiring easier, more convenient, practical, but it is questionable whether that was actually achieved. I'm sure some metrics were improved, corporations have better awareness of who was hired and when, and they can do more background checks, penny-pinch wages and target workers for layoffs more accurately, they can optimize diversity scores to manage unionization risks...
On the other hand perhaps 'old-school hiring' wasn't so bad. Perhaps somebody can still be a good employee despite having used the n-word in 2008 or being an ex-con in some other state.
pigeonburger
3hr ago
No, how long before you get permanent residency is dependent on what pathway you're using. My wife visited as a tourist before we started the permanent residency process, but she never actually lived here officially until she got it. Technically you don't even need to have been in Canada. You're eligible for citizenship 3 years after having started living in Canada, and once you are a permanent resident. So you could even count, for instance, years spent as a temporary resident with a student or work visa before you got permanent residency.
have lived in Canada for at least 3 out of the last 5 years (1,095 days)
I feel like this is a little bit unfair on zoomers here. It's true that online applications are kind of a waste of time, the response rate is so poor. At the same time the boomer nostrum of "just go in and give them a firm handshake" might have worked for (white) men back in 1955, an age when people were happy to hand out junior executive positions to (white) dudes they just met, but it's just silly in this day and age. The old world is dead, but the new struggles to be born - in the meantime we have crappy online job boards.
Personally, looking for temporary work in New Zealand, I've gotten work through all of online applications, pavement pounding, agencies and word of mouth. There's value, too, in being aggressive - just asking people you meet if they know of any work going has some response rate. I think maybe some people worry they're being pushy but most managers do not like looking for new staff and are happy to see people who just want to work.
(More that all of this is for low wage/status work. The game is totally different if you want like, a real career)
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